Welcome back! To the newest members of our Orange family, welcome for the first time.

Chancellor Haynie's message to the community last week centered on a theme important to me: that faculty and staff show up each day ready to invest in our students, the same way someone once invested in them. At Arts and Sciences, we’re choosing to invest in distinctive ways that prepare our students like no one else.

That, in a sentence, is why we are here.

A superb example is the special career-building opportunities that exist across our college. Forensics students work real crime-scene scenarios before they ever set foot in a lab job. Art history students curate shows with the Syracuse University Art Museum. Communication sciences and disorders students train in a new on-campus medical simulation suite. And mathematics and physics students can now prepare for the next generation of technology with faculty in our Institute for Quantum and Information Science.

This focus on real-world preparation goes beyond the classroom and lab. A&S offers career immersion trips and experiences in a variety of fields and cities. Study abroad options (including newly expanded options in Madrid for STEM students) abound across countries and subjects. And since 2020, our Student-Alumni Connections Program has sparked more than 2,300 conversations between current students and successful A&S graduates.

So, to our newest students: take the Chancellor's advice and say yes to new things — a program, a lab, a conversation you didn't expect to have. That's where these opportunities tend to start. To everyone else, that invitation never expires!

Thank you for choosing Arts and Sciences, again or for the first time. I'm glad to begin this year with you.